Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cao, Yupeng, Nair, Aishwarya Muralidharan, Soofi, Nastaran Jamalipour, Eyimife, Elyon, Subbalakshmi, K. P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cao, Yupeng
Nair, Aishwarya Muralidharan
Soofi, Nastaran Jamalipour
Eyimife, Elyon
Subbalakshmi, K. P.
author_facet Cao, Yupeng
Nair, Aishwarya Muralidharan
Soofi, Nastaran Jamalipour
Eyimife, Elyon
Subbalakshmi, K. P.
contents Scientific facts are often spun in the popular press with the intent to influence public opinion and action, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automatic detection of misinformation in the scientific domain is challenging because of the distinct styles of writing in these two media types and is still in its nascence. Most research on the validity of scientific reporting treats this problem as a claim verification challenge. In doing so, significant expert human effort is required to generate appropriate claims. Our solution bypasses this step and addresses a more real-world scenario where such explicit, labeled claims may not be available. The central research question of this paper is whether it is possible to use large language models (LLMs) to detect misinformation in scientific reporting. To this end, we first present a new labeled dataset SciNews, containing 2.4k scientific news stories drawn from trusted and untrustworthy sources, paired with related abstracts from the CORD-19 database. Our dataset includes both human-written and LLM-generated news articles, making it more comprehensive in terms of capturing the growing trend of using LLMs to generate popular press articles. Then, we identify dimensions of scientific validity in science news articles and explore how this can be integrated into the automated detection of scientific misinformation. We propose several baseline architectures using LLMs to automatically detect false representations of scientific findings in the popular press. For each of these architectures, we use several prompt engineering strategies including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting. We also test these architectures and prompting strategies on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?
Cao, Yupeng
Nair, Aishwarya Muralidharan
Soofi, Nastaran Jamalipour
Eyimife, Elyon
Subbalakshmi, K. P.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Social and Information Networks
Scientific facts are often spun in the popular press with the intent to influence public opinion and action, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automatic detection of misinformation in the scientific domain is challenging because of the distinct styles of writing in these two media types and is still in its nascence. Most research on the validity of scientific reporting treats this problem as a claim verification challenge. In doing so, significant expert human effort is required to generate appropriate claims. Our solution bypasses this step and addresses a more real-world scenario where such explicit, labeled claims may not be available. The central research question of this paper is whether it is possible to use large language models (LLMs) to detect misinformation in scientific reporting. To this end, we first present a new labeled dataset SciNews, containing 2.4k scientific news stories drawn from trusted and untrustworthy sources, paired with related abstracts from the CORD-19 database. Our dataset includes both human-written and LLM-generated news articles, making it more comprehensive in terms of capturing the growing trend of using LLMs to generate popular press articles. Then, we identify dimensions of scientific validity in science news articles and explore how this can be integrated into the automated detection of scientific misinformation. We propose several baseline architectures using LLMs to automatically detect false representations of scientific findings in the popular press. For each of these architectures, we use several prompt engineering strategies including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting. We also test these architectures and prompting strategies on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B.
title Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14268